Artificial intelligence has made staggering progress in recent years, particularly in terms of CAPTCHA resolution. These annoying little tests are now completely obsolete, according to the results of a team of American researchers.
OpenAI, Microsoft and Google have sworn to Joe Biden to make artificial intelligence safer. Meanwhile, AI advances are chilling. According to a study by a team of researchers at the University of California, robots are particularly good at solving CAPTCHA, these unbearable little puzzles designed to verify that a user is indeed a human being.
From its full name Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA), this technology older than the internet will be well put back in the closet of history after the discovery of American researchers. Indeed, AI pretend to be humans better than us: robots are much better and faster to solve these tests.
CAPTCHA overwhelmed by artificial intelligence
The information is to be taken with a grain of salt, since the published article has not yet been peer reviewed. However, the researchers come from a renowned academic institution. They found that despite the improvement of CAPTCHAs over the past two decades, techniques to circumvent them have overtaken them, notably through artificial intelligence.
The researchers examined 120 of the 200 most popular websites, which use CAPTCHA to verify that users are human beings. They then asked 1,400 participants of different levels of computer literacy to complete a total of 14,000 of these CAPTCHAs. They then compared their results to those of AI designed to thwart these tests.
As a result, the robots were able to beat the human participants, not only in terms of speed, but also in terms of accuracy: that of humans ranged from 50 to 84%, while the robots had an impressive accuracy rate of 99.8%.
Artificial intelligence, a danger on a large scale
In the pages of New Scientist, team leader Gene Tsudik says, “CAPTCHA is very unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion,” he says humorously. “But people don’t know if this effort, this colossal global effort that is invested in CAPTCHA resolution every day, every year, every month, is really worth it.” If the results of the study are true, it is a considerable waste of time for all of humanity.
More seriously, scientists warn in their paper that “if nothing is done, robots could perform harmful actions on a large scale”. A warning that echoes the concerns of Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, who is so afraid of its creation that he makes insomnia.
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